


Thunderbird

by Lysandra



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Minor Violence, Referenced Ammet/Khaba, Sexuality, Unrequited Love, bartimaeus/ptolemy tag is for one-sided puppy crush, sexuality tag is for description of thoughts and feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22770985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysandra/pseuds/Lysandra
Summary: “Everyone cares at the beginning, before the world gets to them. It’s easy when you don’t know any better.”
Relationships: Bartimaeus/Kitty Jones, Bartimaeus/Ptolemy (Bartimaeus)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 27





	Thunderbird

“ _Then this is what it is to love something which is not at hand, which the lover does not have: it is to desire the preservation of what he now has in that time to come, so that he will have it then.”_ -Plato, _Symposium_

* * *

Ptolemy could still walk.

Not well, and not without assistance, but it was a point of pride to him that he could manage to stagger his way down the hall to his bedchamber with my arm round his waist. I personally thought this was a ridiculous use of his limited energy, but I did understand why he insisted on it. It was about dignity. That being said, I listened with a proportionate amount of concern to the wheeze building in Ptolemy’s chest. He’d never had good lungs. If he started to cough, I was carrying him, and he could deal with it.

“It really is getting easier,” Ptolemy managed between gasps. “I could only manage a few steps before, remember?”

“I remember,” I said, tightening the arm I was using to support most of his body weight. I had taken the shape of a sunburnt boy I’d recently seen on the docks so that I could be approximately the same height. “And I remember how blessedly quiet those jaunts were. Now you’ve relearnt how to walk and talk at the same time.”

Ptolemy giggled. We took a few more halting steps together before we made it to the threshold. I peered at him. “I’ll need to lift you to get you into bed anyway,” I pointed out. Ptolemy sighed like all the burdens of the world had fallen on his shoulders. He leant his cheek against mine for a brief moment, a warming gesture of affection, as he regained his breath. I focused on the feeling of his ribcage expanding and contracting against mine.

“Very w-” He cut off as I lifted him into my arms, cradling him like an infant, and strode the last few paces to his bed. I deposited him carefully among the linens, and he looked up at me with an expression of grateful embarrassment, smoothing down his nightshirt. I adjusted the pillow under his head and busied myself with tucking him in. He’d grown too weak to do it himself, and he felt the cold much more easily since his great journey, so I took care to cover him in layers of blankets. When I was away, he had human servants to do this for him, but they often neglected to cover his feet.

“Rekhyt,” Ptolemy asked, letting his eyes fall shut, “do you think there will be others when I’m gone?”

I sighed heavily. “We’ve spoken on this before,” I reminded him, tucking the woven fabric over his thin shoulders. “I have never met a human being who shared your goals. Perhaps there will be others. Perhaps not. I wouldn’t count on it.”

Ptolemy shifted under the mound of blankets. If anyone tried to accost him in the night, they would surely be stymied by the fortress of textiles I’d hidden him in. I knelt at his bedside. He opened his eyes again to look at me. His eyes: that was the one thing about him that hadn’t changed. They were as clear and searching as ever. He smiled up at me almost hesitantly. “I meant for you specifically.”

I recoiled visibly. “Of course not,” I said. “Is that what you think? That I’m going to go window shopping for a new human to take your spot the moment you…” I could not finish the thought.

“I did not mean to insult you,” he said. “I only meant that…” He had to pause to take a couple of rattling breaths. “I hope that I will not be the last to care for you. No, it’s more than hope. I know.”

In those days, Ptolemy spoke his mind more bluntly than ever before. I put it down to the effects of the Other Place on his mind, but in hindsight it’s clear that he knew that he was going to die. I, on the other hand, refused to hear it. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’ve got a while yet. There’s no need for romantic ponderings.” Ptolemy sighed, wriggling a bit to get comfortable. His bones ached so much nowadays.

“You know,” he said, “you never did answer my old question about djinn and romance.” Great. Now he was too wound up to sleep. It would take me an hour of kneading on his chest as a purring cat to get him to rest.

“It was a strange thing to ask,” I said. Ptolemy shrugged back the blankets and reached out with one fragile arm to wrap his gnarled fingers around my wrist. Without thinking, I covered his hand with my other, keeping it warm. His skin was like parchment paper.

“You don’t avoid my questions because they’re strange,” Ptolemy said. I was stuck where I was, wasn’t I?

“I have seen it,” I admitted. “But it was a terrible, twisted thing. Both human and spirit were deformed by it.”

“Perhaps it need not be so terrible,” he said wistfully.

“Great chat-up line.”

“Oh, hush.”

I grinned, but I knew longing when I heard it. In truth, my mind had wandered in that direction more than once. Not in an immediate sense, not when he was still so young, but it had occurred to me that my feelings for the boy might change as I watched him grow into a man. Spirits aren’t known to engage in courtship, but I knew it was possible for us to be moved in that way. But what would happen if Ptolemy came of age and refused to marry? What would happen when his family realised why? Worse, what would happen if he did take a wife? Ptolemy tethered to a loveless marriage with some poor Egyptian girl? I tried to clear my mind of that image. We were having a moment. I stroked the back of Ptolemy’s hand.

“You should rest,” I prodded. “You have notes to edit in the morning.”

“You don’t care about the notes,” he said, lightly teasing. It was true; I didn’t care about the notes. I cared that _he_ cared about the notes. The humour left his voice quickly. “But tell me more of this spirit and this human being you spoke of.”

Boy, he was stubborn in his old age. “It’s a very ugly story, Polemaeus.1”

“Yes,” he said. “But you’ve told me enough beautiful ones for a lifetime.”

For a moment, I bent my head. Well, he’d asked about romance. Perhaps I could scour those notions out of his young mind. “Do you remember,” I began, “the story of my time under the reign of the great King Solomon?”

Ptolemy’s eyes gleamed with excitement. His fingers squeezed my wrist with surprising strength. “You know how I love that one.”

“Then you’ll recall what I told you of the marid Ammet and our master Khaba the Cruel.”

Ptolemy nodded.

“I never did tell you,” I said, “one of the things that Ammet said to me. He told me that he followed his master’s orders willingly, without coercion. He risked his life and endured the many agonies the earth inflicts upon us without being bound to Khaba’s will. And he did it because he loved his master. This was no bond of friendship. He enjoyed his subjugation. He enjoyed it the way a man enjoys his lover’s touch.”

“Khaba hurt him,” Ptolemy said.

“He did.”

“Didn’t he love him at all?” Ptolemy’s eyes searched mine.

It was a difficult question. “If he did, it may as well have been hatred for the way he showed it.”

Ptolemy was quiet for a moment. “The idea of it disgusts you,” he finally observed. He spoke quickly and without emotion. “Thank you. I think I understand now. There can be no such love between master and servant. The imbalance of power is inherently corrupt.” He began to remove his hand. I did not release it. I was suddenly very aware of my position, kneeling on the floor before him. I rose to sit beside him on the bed.

“You have nothing in common with a man like Khaba,” I said. “He did things to spirits that would never even cross your mind, not if you had a thousand years to think about it.”

“I was making no such comparison,” said Ptolemy.

“You were, and don’t deny it.” I took a deep breath in and out.2 “And you are misguided, because the fact of the matter is that Ammet would not be rotting at the bottom of the sea if it were you he’d loved instead.”

Ptolemy made a quiet noise, and I couldn’t tell if it was a chuckle or the beginning of a sob. It sounded pained, whatever it was. I released his hand and moved to tuck a curl of hair behind his ear. No tears glittered on his lined cheeks, but his breaths were quick rasps. “I feel so sorry for him,” he said. “For Ammet.”

I shook my head. “Remember that he did those things willingly. He made no attempt to fight his master. He was as disturbed as Khaba. When Khaba did his experiments, Ammet helped. He betrayed his own kind. And for what?”

“My dear Rekhyt,” said Ptolemy softly. I waited for more, but it didn’t come. His eyes fluttered shut instead. I’d managed to exhaust him, at least. I became a small, fluffy desert cat and padded up the bed to make myself comfortable in the hollow between my master’s neck and shoulder. He didn’t react, except to tilt his head towards me so that my fur tickled his cheek. Even in sleep, he knew me. It was a curious thing, the way that Ptolemy’s gesture had bonded us together. My respect for him and the accompanying affection were great, but I sometimes felt that it went far deeper than that. It was as though his essence and mine were tied together even now, on some plane that neither human nor spirit could see. But hadn’t I just been discouraging Ptolemy from romantic ideas?

It was best not to get carried away.

The sand cat gave a yawn and started to purr.

* * *

“Rekhyt,” Kitty said.

I cringed. Her face fell. “Oh, dear.” I said. “Not quite. Add a little more breath to the _kh_ sound.”

She nodded. She leant forwards to rest her elbows on the kitchen table, steeling herself. “Rekhyt,” she said again. It was closer this time, but her accent still colored the word almost past the point of recognition. If she hadn’t been so frustrated by her inability to say it correctly, it might have been charming.

“That was better. But you’re a European. I wouldn’t expect it to be perfect. I’d like to have seen Ptolemy try to pronounce something in French.”

Kitty’s brows were doing that thing that they did, turning down into a sharp V in her consternation. Her breakfast, intermittently picked at for the better part of an hour, had been thoroughly abandoned in favour of our impromptu language lesson. “I can’t speak French, either,” she said. “Say it for me again.”

“ _Rekhyt_ ,” I said.

“Again. Slower.”

I repeated it. Trilled r, low e, raspy kh at the back of the throat, a barely-there vowel, a crisp t. She watched my mouth as I said it, moving her own in tandem, as if she were tuning an instrument. She closed her eyes.

“Rekhyt,” she said, and I could see her holding the contours in her mouth, focusing on the feel rather than the sound. And, just this time, it was perfect. She would probably never say it that way again. Hearing it after so long was strange. It was a name that had been lost to me for an aeon, one that I could never reclaim. It wasn’t the same in Kitty’s mouth. For her, it was just a word. For her.

“Good,” I croaked. “That was good.” I collected myself. “Maybe you’ll get a whole sentence one day.”

“Doubt that,” she said. Her eyes darted from mine. “I think I’ll stick to English.”

“Your Latin sounds fine.”

“Latin is an Indo-European language.”

I raised my brows. “My, look at you! _Indo-European._ Someone’s been hitting the books.”

“Fuck off,” said Kitty, grinning at me, and I laughed, ghosts dispelled. “I always liked words,” she said, picking up a slice of toast and toying with it. “In school, I was best in reading and writing. We mostly stuck to the West, though. The things I learned, you’d have thought nothing existed farther east than Bulgaria.” She ripped a bit of crust off and popped it in her mouth.

I nodded while she chewed. “That’s always how it is,” I said. “Strange to see most of the history of civilisation reduced to a footnote when something new and shiny comes along.”

“New and shiny,” Kitty echoed under her breath. She dropped her toast again, abandoning the show of trying, and cleared her throat. “Now I’m wondering,” she said. “Did you want me to call you something else?”

I tilted my head at her. “No. Why?”

Kitty shrugged. “Just that…you said that Ptolemy didn’t use your name out of respect. I was wondering if it bothers you when I do it.”

I folded my hands under my chin, elbows propped on the scratched surface of the table. “It’s different with you, I suppose,” I said.

Kitty’s brow folded again. “How so?”

“Ptolemy was a magician,” I said offhandedly. “He was my friend, but he was also my master. He wanted to relinquish the power he had over me. That was one of the ways he did it. As for you…no offence, but you never had that much power over me to begin with.”

Kitty frowned. “I summoned you.”

“You did,” I conceded. “But you did it like you were inviting me over for tea. Completely different context. And you never had other spirits doing your laundry.”

Kitty blinked, surprised. “Ptolemy did? The other djinn were his friends, too, weren’t they? Isn’t that a little-”

“Are you going to eat that, or just play with it?” I interrupted curtly. “I didn’t go to all the effort of making you breakfast just to let it get cold.”

“I’m letting it breathe,” she said. She picked up her fork again and made a big show of pushing an egg around the plate, but did not resume her line of questioning.

“Honestly,” I huffed. “I know you’re only twenty-six, but perhaps it’s time for the nursing home after all. Clearly you need to be spoon-fed.”

“Oh, have you forgotten what I said already?” she asked sweetly.

“And what was that?”

“Fuck off.”

If Ptolemy had heard the way we often spoke to each other, his hair would have stood on end. The thought was one that made me smile. I hadn’t lied to Kitty; the relationship we had was different to the one Ptolemy and I had shared. What we’d had could not be replaced. But, I had realised, nor could Ptolemy have been a substitute for Kitty. That was its own agony, discovering the many shapes that can’t-live-without could take.

But there was more that I didn’t tell her. I liked the way my name sounded in her mouth, brash London accent and all. I liked hearing her say it through bursts of barely-contained laughter. For five thousand years, _Bartimaeus_ had been an elaborate shackle, _about_ me but never _for_ me. Kitty had taken my name, wiped off the dirt, and given it back to me.

“Oh, that’s right. I think I do remember you saying something like that, once or twice, every day for the past seven years.”

Kitty took a sip of her tea, long since gone lukewarm. “It’s not that bad, is it?” she asked. “You’re just bitter because when _I_ sass you, you’re not the one who looks clever.” I leant forwards to flick the tip of her nose; she shouted and waved my hand away.

I redirected my course to grab the edge of Kitty’s plate. “Since you’re not eating this-” Kitty’s hand seized on mine.

“What are you doing?” she looked far more agitated than my clearing the table seemed to warrant.

“Taking your plate. Are you-”

“Put it down.” There was a steel in her voice sometimes that gave me pause.

“Well, alright! If you weren’t done, you only had to say.” Kitty wasn’t usually rude. Blunt, yes, but not rude.

“It’s not that,” she said. She was suddenly flustered, quickly gathering up cutlery and her half-empty teacup and dropping them noisily on the plate. “You aren’t here to do chores.”

“It was only a plate,” I said.

“I know,” said Kitty. “I know.”

“You don’t have to imbue clearing the table with some great significance,” I said, crossing my arms. I was growing genuinely irritated now. I didn’t like the thought that she wanted to handle me with kid gloves, the former slave too damaged to handle washing a damn plate.

“It’s not that I see you as too damaged to handle washing a damn plate or anything,” she said. “But every time I set down a dirty cup or throw a towel on the floor or leave a book open with the spine up because I was too lazy to put it away, I see you go and tidy it up. And sometimes I don’t think you even realise you’re doing it, and I…” She stood up. “I’m an idiot. Forget it. I just wanted you to be able to relax for once in your life.”

I watched her carry her dishes to the sink silently. It was true; she’d sounded like an idiot, and a patronising one at that, even if it came from a place of kindness.

In that moment, I was so overcome with affection I thought it might kill me.

Our awkward little spat was all but forgotten by mid-afternoon. We had our occasional friendly shouting matches, but they never lasted long. That’s the problem with mutual respect: it makes it difficult to get a good argument going. In lieu of that, Kitty and I spent the rest of the day following her usual routine, and sunset found us outdoors, where we had some of our best conversations.

“You decided so quickly that you wanted to be best mates, and we’d only spoken once before.” I sat beside Kitty on the wooden porch, where the two of us were taking the evening air. It was spring, late April, and warm enough that Kitty wore only a light jacket over her shirt. I inspected my own knees, curious to hear her response.

Kitty laughed, but there was a self-consciousness to it. “I had wanted that for a while, honestly.”

“What?” I looked at her, eyes narrowed. “How long? The first time we talked, you thought I was a monster. Are you telling me that you summoned me up thinking we’d go out for ice cream and weave each other friendship bracelets?”

“Of course not,” she said. “But when I was doing my research,” she said, “I compared what I was seeing on the pages, the way that magicians write about ‘demons’, to the conversation you and I had. It made it obvious how utterly wrong they were. And I realised that you weren’t a creature of evil. You were an individual.

“To be honest, at first I didn’t want to believe you were a person. Because if I believed that, then I had to admit that all the other spirits were people, too. It meant that twice as much suffering existed in the world, and I’d done nothing to stop it.”

I thought back to our first _true_ conversation, the one we’d had without bodies in our way. “You still thought I was different from other djinn. You don’t believe that any longer?”

“Of course you’re different. But before I thought it was because you were more human. I didn’t realise that I was wrong about what being human was.”

“What is humanity, then? Go on. Explain the human condition.” I folded my fingers under my chin and stared at her expectantly.

She gave me a lopsided smile. “Somehow I feel less qualified to answer that than anyone else.”

That was true enough. Just as manifesting on Earth corrupted the essence of a spirit irreversibly, Kitty’s great journey had changed her. It was a subtle change, but a powerful one. Where before she had been fearless, now she was utterly immovable. I felt it, too, in the bond we shared. There was a tinge of mutual understanding. _Empathy_ did not quite do it justice. It was as though there was an imperceptible thread binding us together, whichever side of the void I happened to be on.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” said Kitty, straightening her back.

“ _Bartimaeus, I can’t get enough of your handsome and fascinating presence._ ”

“Not a chance,” she said. “It’s actually that I’ve been...seeing someone, I suppose.”

For a moment, I felt nothing. Then, a sensation that I would guess is quite similar to how humans experience nausea echoed through my essence. I swallowed it down, but I felt cold and hollow. Seeing someone. _Seeing_ someone. She had a romantic interest, maybe a lover. I tried to convince myself that I was not on the verge of complete hysterics before I spoke again.

“Seeing someone,” I repeated flatly. The thought that there might be someone whose presence Kitty preferred to mine wasn’t one that had occurred to me before. I found that I utterly loathed it. What right did some pathetic, mundane man have to her time? What right did he have to put his hands on her?

Kitty furrowed her brow. “It’s nothing serious,” she said. “We’ve been on a few dates. That’s all. He’s...sweet. Intelligent. I like him well enough. I just thought to mention it to you.”

I nodded, casually pushing back a cuticle. “I suppose I’m not _really_ surprised. You’re a cut above the rest, don’t get me wrong, but you’re still human. It figures you’d want to hang around with dullards now and again.”

The smile in Kitty’s eyes died, and I took an amount of sick satisfaction in the hurt I’d caused her. Well, it was mutual...even if I’d done it on purpose and she hadn’t. I shrugged that thought away.

“What?”

“Well, let’s face it. We have some good chats, but you can’t exactly keep up, can you?” I kept my voice level and measured, making disinterested eye contact. “Anyway-”

"What a load of shit," said Kitty.

My mouth popped open, composure dissolved. "What was that?”

“You’re going to insult me because you’re jealous? And to think that all this time I didn’t realise that you were _actually_ a child and not merely shaped like one!” Kitty was glowering at me.

“Jealous?” I laughed harshly. “You see, this is what I mean. We’re hardly on the same page here. I am not _jealous_. I have more power and more personality in a single mote of my essence than your entire species is capable of. Why would I be jealous of whichever oaf you’ve decided to fawn over?”

"Do you think you can lie to me?" Kitty's eyes were fire, and she jabbed a finger pointedly. "Do you think you've ever been able to lie to me? Do you think the shrugging and the examining the nails and the _I'm-Bartimaeus-and-I-don't-care_ routine actually works?” Oh, that did it!

“Don’t you _dare_ claim to know me!” I thundered. “You arrogant, self-righteous fool! You have no idea!” I got to my feet, but Kitty followed me. In Ptolemy’s shape, Kitty towered over me.

“ _You_ have no idea!” she said. She wasn’t cowed in the slightest; she stepped a bit closer. “You have no idea how easy you are to read sometimes!”

“You’re delusional! You see whatever it is that I want you to see, and nothing more! You have seen the Other Place, but you will never understand what it is to be born of it. You are not _like_ me, and you do not _know_ me!” By this point, my small boy’s guise had grown tall enough to loom over Kitty on spindly limbs. My eyes were black voids; my voice was barely human.

“And apparently you don’t know _me_ , because you have yet to realise that you cannot scare me out of caring for you!” Kitty shed no tears, but her voice wavered uncharacteristically. It was my words she reacted to, however, and not my appearance. It was as though she didn’t even see it, staring hazily past to something that went deeper even than my true form.

The flames that had been spiraling around my limbs died down, first to embers, then to ash. She’d spoken the unspeakable. Ptolemy hadn’t said it and Nathaniel hadn’t said it and the worst, most mortifying, most unforgivable of all, was that I had never said it, but Kitty had said it and now there it was, hanging in the air between us.

“You’ll be the death of me. I swear it.” Even I could tell I sounded defeated. I allowed my guise to shrink back to his proper size.

“Not on my life,” Kitty said furiously.

“No, not that. Don’t you dare pledge me that.” I stared deep into Kitty’s eyes - dark as night, dark as mine - but she did not look away.

“Then stop trying to hide from me,” she said, frowning. “Idiot,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

“I’m not jealous,” I reiterated.

Kitty rolled her eyes. “Right. Sure.”

“Kitty…”

“It’s not as though I’m going to marry him,” she said, and her voice was soft and sad. “And I won’t see you any less. We’re not going to stop being friends just because I’m spending time with him. You needn’t worry.”

I lifted my chin.3 “I’m not worried. Spend your time how you like.”4

Kitty’s mouth twitched.5 “It’s your time, too,” she said.6

* * *

These days, the summons was less of a tearing and more of a prodding, like being woken from a nap.

Kitty had worked out how to do it so that this part, at least, didn't hurt me. An open summons, she called it. She'd pared down the incantation and begun using a sort of minimalist pentacle, and the result was a weak summons that lacked bite. In fact, I could have ignored it altogether if I'd wanted to.

I didn't.

I reached out to the feeble thread connecting me to Earth and let myself be drawn into it, like wading into a current. There was something moving about this extra piece of agency that Kitty had granted me. It evened the playing field just that much more, a token of her unwavering respect.

That point was underscored by the design of the pentacle that I now arrived in. Rather than slashing a line through the paint, she'd left a deliberate gap. On either side of that gap, she'd painted an extra line outwards, away from the center of the circle and towards the one in which Kitty stood. She'd repeated the design in her own pentacle, so that there were no marks on the floor between us. I'd teased her about the embellishments, but I understood why she'd done it. It emphasised the deliberate nature of her choice.

I had intended to take Ptolemy’s form again, but why not change it up? After all, I was starting to get tired of craning my neck to look at Kitty’s face. I became a young Sumerian man. The original I’d last seen lying face-down in the mud, just one casualty out of many that day. He hadn’t stood out, except to me. I was so very young, and he was the first person I’d ever seen die.7

As always, Kitty removed herself from the pentacle as quickly as she could, as though it were distasteful to her to even be near it. We never spoke within the circles. Before she’d laid them down in paint, she’d opened our visits by kicking a gap into the chalk line with perhaps a bit more aggression than strictly necessary. But this time she paused once she’d left the pentacle, moving no closer, and stared at me.

“Oh. That’s new,” she remarked, as though she were commenting on a stylish new jacket I’d purchased. She cleared her throat awkwardly, dutifully avoiding looking at my bare chest. I couldn’t help but feel pleased.

“Old, actually. I used to favor this guise. I figured I’d dust it off for a bit. What do you think?”

“It...suits you,” said Kitty. “Did you know him?”

“If watching someone take a spear to the chest counts as knowing them, then yes. I knew him in excruciating detail.” I drifted across the floor towards the door. “So! What’s on the itinerary for today?”

“I want to show you something,” said Kitty, face lighting up with sudden excitement. Her ever-spectacular aura was especially dazzling that day, which told me she was terribly worked up about something. She took my hand in hers, and I smiled at the sight of our fingers laced together. Most humans see djinn as inherently contaminated, and avoid our touch as though it might taint them. But Kitty wasn’t afraid of contamination of any kind, and it had taken me some time to readjust to the sensation of being touched.8 However, I quickly realised that I didn’t mind the contact. Only because it was Kitty, of course.

I was dragged down the stairs and into the study, where Kitty picked up a slim, fraying book that lay open on her desk. She pointed to the top of the page. “This is a book about animal imagery in indigenous South American music.”

“Are we having a lesson? What’s this about?”

“No, look!” She pointed with more vigor. “This one is a song about a silver-feathered serpent who messes with the townsfolk and gets away with it by cleverly outsmarting them. Sound familiar?”

“Give me that.” I took the book from her. _Now_ I was interested.

“It can’t be a coincidence, can it? Some of the verses even match the stories you’ve told me from when you used that guise.” Kitty was positively vibrating with excitement.

“You’re right. You’re right! Ha! And to think it’s survived all these years...well, people have a habit of remembering what’s important, eh?” I’ll admit, the discovery was a boost to my ego. Deserving, of course. “Is that why you picked up this book? Doing some research behind my back, hmm?” I raised an eyebrow at her.

Kitty grinned at me. “I had to make sure you weren’t full of it.”

I batted my eyes innocently. “Me? Lie? Kitty, you wound me.”

“Wounded by a feeble human woman? I don’t expect to read about that in the tales.”

I responded with my usual grace and dignity.

“Don’t stick your tongue out at me!” Kitty snorted through her nose the way she sometimes did when I made her laugh. Then, slightly out of breath from all the excitement, she stepped away to lower herself into her armchair. “I swear, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re...how old are you now?”

“Five thousand and thirty-five,” I said primly. “And some change.”

“Hang on. Do you have a birthday?”

“I suppose you could call it that, but I don’t know it. It was during the harvest season sometime. August, probably.”

Kitty stretched in her chair. The light was low, and I realised it was afternoon. Kitty had run errands in the morning, presumably, and hoped to spare me the boredom. Now her eyes were heavy-lidded as she struggled not to doze off. Although the summoning was easier when I was doing half the work, it still took its toll on her.

“Sleep,” I suggested. “I’ll reorganise your pantry or do cartwheels in the garden or something.”

Kitty smiled slowly, eyes falling shut. “Not in that skirt, you won’t,” she mumbled.

Instead, I found myself poring over the various books in her small library while she napped quietly a few paces away. It was an eclectic collection, her areas of study far more narrow than any magician’s. Occasionally I stumbled upon a hastily scribbled note or a dog-eared page. Kitty was not a scholar, but she could have been, had she chosen that path. I was musing over this (destiny, paths not taken, other such profundities) when I heard Kitty stirring from her sleep. She’d rested only twenty minutes.

“Wonderful,” I said, not looking up from the book in my hands. “I was about to dissolve from sheer boredom.”

“What, all over my carpet?” She stood slowly – now that she was in her thirties, her joints pained her - and crossed the room to peer over my shoulder. I felt a warm puff of breath against the back of my neck, and suddenly I was completely unable to focus on anything but that. My essence tingled pleasantly, and somewhere within me was an odd stirring. Her voice was low, almost a whisper.

“What are you reading?”

“Uhh,” I said.

As if to spite me, Kitty hooked an arm around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder. It wasn’t a gesture she’d tried before, but there was usually a distinct height difference between us. The feeling was simultaneously pleasant and panic-inducing. Something hot and dark unfurled in my belly. This close, I could feel the shape of her body against mine and the slow rise and fall of her chest. Her hair smelled clean and faintly sweet with soap.

“That one’s boring.” The sound of her voice reverberated through my essence.

“Yep! Absolute dreck, this one,” I said, clumsily shoving it back into the bookshelf. Kitty was merciful enough to release me before my essence imploded into a black hole, but as she slept that night, I was still thinking about her embrace. The way that it had made me feel was strange, but not _entirely_ unfamiliar. And it was certainly not the first time I’d felt it in her presence. No, there was no denying it. I was very, very sick. Five thousand years of Earth and its influence had changed me. I knew that most of the corruption was irreversible. I would never be purged of the way it had touched me. But I had thought, still, that desire - or its absence - was one of the things that separated me from Earth and its beasts.

It was slaved to such thoughts that I found myself standing in front of the old, water-spotted mirror in Kitty’s spare bedroom. I was fooling myself if I didn’t believe that I had taken the Sumerian man’s form for one blindingly obvious reason: I liked the thought that she might be able to find me attractive. As easy as blinking, I shifted; I became a perfect copy of the woman sleeping in the other room. I hadn’t worn her shape since she was a teenager, but it felt familiar nonetheless. Kitty’s body hadn’t aged since she’d traveled to the Other Place. Or it had, rather, but not in any visible way. As she got older, she simultaneously healed more and more from her early-life venture, and the result was that she looked about fifty, and had done for the past twenty years.

I lifted a hand and touched the corner of my mouth – Kitty’s mouth - thoughtfully, then let that hand trail up over my cheekbone and into my hair. On a whim, I released Kitty’s hair from its usual knot and watched it fall loose about her face, just kissing her collarbone. The hand in my hair came down to rest there at her throat, toying with the ends of the silver strands before I dragged a single finger up the side of my neck, slowly and deliberately. My lips parted. The woman in the mirror looked at herself with pupils blown wide.

I watched, imagining that it wasn’t my own reflection, but Kitty in front of me, hair down and slightly mussed. I imagined approaching her, stepping closer until I’d crossed the boundary between friendly and intimate. Then I’d reach up and seize her hair in my fist, hearing her gasp. _What are you doing?_ she’d say, surprised but not afraid, and I’d find her pliant as I dragged her to me and pulled her so her back was flush with my chest. I’d tug her head to the side to drag my teeth along her exposed neck, tasting my next meal.

That was where the fantasy went all wrong, as it always did. I didn’t rip into the meat of her neck and tear it out in wet, red strings. I didn’t crack her bones between my teeth and use my tongue to work out the marrow. I didn’t do any of the things I ought to have wanted to do. Instead, I kissed her neck and I kissed her shoulder, tasting her animal sweat. I pressed my thumbs into the flesh of her hips and-

I shuddered, alone in the silent house. My hand was toying with the first button on my blouse. I considered. She _had_ told me to entertain myself. But no, here was a line I dared not cross. I locked eyes with myself in the mirror. They were empty and black.

* * *

Robust as she was, I suppose I hadn’t _really_ expected Kitty to live forever. It was always in the back of my mind somewhere, that her life was fleeting where mine was not. But some part of me still hoped that there would be one more day, and one more after that, and one more after that. It seemed that Kitty’s belief in the impossible had rubbed off on me. But watching her stretch out in a hospital bed, the reality of the situation bore down on me with the force of a thousand storms. I could only brace myself against the tearing winds and hope that my inevitable destruction was quick.

I cradled one of Kitty’s hands in mine, tracing the blue veins in her wrist with Nathaniel's long fingers. After how I'd known him - inside and out - it felt odd to remember him this way. Rarely did I feel like such a hollow imitation of the human form. Kitty watched me with a wry smile, as though she were faintly embarrassed about having a body at all. I felt her pulse under my fingertips.

“The nurse said I have good veins,” said Kitty. “I think it was meant to be reassuring.”

“That or she was chatting you up.” I winked at her, and she rolled her eyes in response.

“I’m old enough to be her great-grandmother.”

“You never know.”

She snorted and laced her fingers with mine. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. I couldn’t quite meet her eyes.

“I do hope I’m keeping you entertained.”

She smiled at me. “Always. Although...I could use with some distracting at the moment.” A muscle in her jaw ticked.

“I’ll tell the nurse to give you more morphine.”

Kitty shook her head, stubborn to the end. “No. I want to be alert.” I didn’t have to ask why. I understood perfectly: she didn’t want to risk missing anything.

“What kind of distraction do you want?” I asked. “ Monologue? Gossip? Embarrassing secrets? Poetry recital?”

Kitty bit her lip. “Tell me a secret, then.”

The words I hadn’t said were like bile on my tongue. I swallowed them down. Instead, I said, “The first time I killed a man…”

Kitty’s eyes went wide. “Oh.” I was as surprised as she was. I had long considered this, too, to be unspeakable.

“The first time I killed a man, I grieved for him. For myself, too. I was too young, too fresh from the Other Place to truly understand the difference.” I caressed Kitty’s knuckles with my thumb. “I knelt over his body and I wailed and gnashed my teeth as though he were my own son. I killed him, and it was like killing a part of myself.” I had no jokes to follow up with; these words carried the unbearable weight of truth.

Kitty looked at me with something like wonder. “You never told me that.” Her voice was hoarse.

“I said _embarrassing_ , didn’t I?”

“That’s not embarrassing,” she said. She squeezed my hand. “It’s...very like you.”

I cocked my head, and there was a softness in her eyes that I might have put down to the drugs if I hadn’t known better. “What does that mean?”

“You cared from the very beginning.”

I sighed. “Everyone cares at the beginning, before the world gets to them. It’s easy when you don’t know any better.”

Kitty nodded agreement. “But you didn’t forget how. That’s the remarkable thing. Five thousand years and you didn’t forget.” She was getting drowsy now, talking nonsense. I realised her skin was cool to the touch.

“Don’t know what I’ll do with myself without you to order me around,” I said, more to myself than to her. My hands shook, but hers were steady. “Bossy old biddy.”

Kitty reached up to touch my cheek with the back of her hand. I allowed myself the comfort. “I don’t own you,” she said. That is what sets apart those few truly noble humans: they refuse to claim what is rightfully theirs.

I bent; I pressed my cheek against her chest. Her breath rose and fell, rose and fell. I waited until I was certain she was asleep to give her another awful truth: “Yes, you do.”

* * *

I had almost forgotten what it felt like to have your essence seized in the jaws of a magician’s vicious spellcraft. The pain startled me out of the fluid mindstream of the Other Place; I was dragged into alertness, howling all the while. Just as disturbing was the unfamiliar quality of the voice that called me; it was like feeling a stranger’s hand on the small of your back on a crowded bus. Still, I didn’t fight it. I didn’t have it in me this time.

Out and across and down I was pulled, and when I arrived on Earth, it was in Ptolemy’s form. I had neither the energy nor the inspiration to come up with anything more impressive than the only shape that had ever truly felt like mine. I peered around me at the room I was in. It was a basement bedroom (or so I assumed from the lack of windows) with whitewashed walls and a ratty carpet some indefinable shade between grey and brown. On those walls were pinned dozens of sketches, pencil drawings that had been produced with what was, for a human, a considerable amount of skill. The furniture in the room was sparse; the wardrobe, bed, and desk all looked to be part of a matching set, while the chair and bedside table were old and worn.

The least impressive part of this tableau was my summoner, who was a young, stoop-shouldered man with a nest of ratty blond hair. He was too old to be an apprentice, which made his living situation all the more depressing - evidently he’d paid for this place. I stood in my pentacle, said nothing, felt nothing. I simply folded my arms and awaited my orders. The boy (he was probably only around twenty) waited, too, possibly expecting me to make the first move. 9 When he realised that wasn’t going to happen, he gave a blustery sigh, pushed his hair back from his face, and began.

“You’re a lot quieter than I thought,” he said. “The codex entry made it sound like you never stop talking. Wait - hold on. I haven’t got the wrong Bartimaeus, have I?” His eyes went wide; he looked halfway to hysteria with his frazzled hair falling into his face again. I decided to take pity on him, if only because I was starting to grow bored.

“Bartimaeus of Uruk,” I said in monotone. “That’s me.”

“I read you have many other titles,” the magician prompted.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you going to tell me what they are?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I glared across at him. “I’m not in the mood. Will you just give me my charge and be done with it?”

The young man huffed at that. “I summoned you specifically because of your reputation, Bartimaeus, and I must say I’m rather disappointed.”

That managed to pique my interest. “And what sort of reputation is that?”

“Brahe describes you as ‘vivacious’, and Almos as ‘an intriguing character, flamboyant by nature, with a certain audacious skill’.” I blinked.

“You really memorised that.”

He was openly pouting now. Evidently I’d spoilt some romantic fantasy of his. “I wanted someone with an actual personality,” he said.

“Tough luck,” I said. “My personality is on holiday at the moment.”

He looked at me with that squinty-eyed scrutiny all magicians use when they’re trying to figure you out. “What happened?” he asked.

It was the way he asked it. He’d assumed not that I was throwing a fit, nor that I had some ulterior motive. He hadn’t read wickedness into my behaviour at all; rather, he had assumed, as he would have of a fellow human being, that something bad had happened to me. There was a fault line in my essence kilometres deep; it was only with great effort that I kept myself from breaking apart completely. I didn’t have the energy to lie to him, and perhaps part of me wanted to see what he would say.

“The woman I love is dead.”

He looked at me for a very long time then, or at least I assumed that it was me he was looking at. I myself had fixed my eyes on the far side of the room, on a little drawing of a boat on a river, and I kept them there as we stood in silence. I listened to the steady flutter of his breathing. I thought about how easy it would be to choke the life out of him. Finally, he spoke once more.

“Your charge,” he said, “is to go to the shops and purchase the things on this list. On the way back, you are to visit the individual whose address I have recorded here. He’ll give you a much more interesting assignment.” Errands, it seemed, had won out over empathy. As he spoke, my master gestured to a flat, glossy object in his hand, the size of a cereal box and about as thick as a magazine. It glowed from within as though lit by some trapped magic. It wasn’t, of course; computers had by this point been around for forty-odd years. Useful as they were, electronics were still bound to the laws of physics. I wasn’t, and so my slavery continued.

My master gestured to release me from my pentacle. I stepped forwards. “You’re not taking this,” he said, waving the computer about, “so just memorise the words and give it back.” Cautiously, he allowed me to take it from his hands. It was warm to the touch, and the unnatural blueish light stung my eyes. I examined the screen for four seconds. I recognised the street I was meant to visit: cruelly, I was back in London. I handed the boy his device back, sealing a mental image of my to-do list away in the vaults of my mind. He held out another piece of plastic; this one was small and flimsy. A credit card. “PIN is two-one-nine-two,” he said.

Appearing on the street outside, I very nearly forgot to dress Ptolemy for the weather. What did fourteen-year-olds wear these days? I decided to cover myself in a big coat and hope for the best. It was December, and at four o’clock the sunlight was already beginning to fade. I walked at a human pace to my first destination, trying not to become absorbed in my thoughts, but I found myself recalling a similar mission for a similar boy. But that was one hundred years ago now. How the time slipped past.

Ten blocks, and I was at an electronics store lit with blinding neon light. The current era was so _bright_ , everything always flashing and blinking. It made me almost sentimental for the days before the technological revolution. I pushed open the door to the shop and recalled my list: I was to purchase a “USB-C adapter”. It turned out to be a small, white cord that I paid for with my master’s credit card before pocketing it. By the time I’d finished the rest of the shopping, it was fully dark outside, something that I had no doubt was intentional on my master’s part. The meeting I was headed to was going to be clandestine indeed.

As I made my way in that direction, I stretched my arms above my head, wincing. The accumulated ache from an afternoon in the same guise was nagging at me, but the city was far too crowded these days for me to find a place to make a discrete change. That was another thing I resented about the twenty-second century: there were eyes everywhere. Shoulders slumped, Ptolemy made his plodding way away from the shinier districts with their cafes and music and into a distinctly more interesting part of town. Here the pavement was poorly-maintained, and once in a while I passed an abandoned shopping cart. As I passed a bus stop, I caught the scent of old blood. In the distance, someone shouted.

A man on the other side of the street was eyeing me suspiciously. I waited for him to pass behind a corner before ducking into an alley and finding it blessedly free of cameras. I needed to change - in this part of the city, an unattended child would draw too much attention. So I became a woman I had known once before, someone I had loved. Her grey hair was pinned up - she’d let it grow long again in her thirties - but was on the verge of falling down. There was a mole on the side of her nose, and another on her left shoulder, though the latter was currently hidden by the simple grey button-down she’d paired with her worn blue jeans and steel-toed boots. She stood with her arms crossed, every bit the curmudgeonly old woman at all of thirty-two years old, and pursed her lips in that way she had, like she was trying to read your mind and was frustrated she couldn’t do it. For a moment, the woman hesitated there, alone except for the scurrying of rats, and then she slipped out of the alleyway and back into the night.

* * *

1 This was an ironic nickname I'd given him, punning on the Greek word _polemos_ , "war". But there was some truth to the joke: when there was something he wanted to know, he launched a full-scale assault.

2 I don’t need to breathe, but sometimes the rhythm is comforting.

3 I should have said it then.

4 And to Ptolemy.

5 To Nathaniel, too.

6 I should have. And now I never will.

7 I know what you want to ask, and I do remember the first man I killed. His is one of few faces I can’t wear. Some things are best left unremembered.

8 For us spirits, physical touch is a good deal more intimate than it is for human beings, who are constantly crawling all over each other. That's what happens when most of the contact you get is violent or a threat of violence. To let someone touch you becomes a great show of trust.

9 Sometimes you’ll get one who looks to you for guidance, which, while admirable, is also a sign of a weak magician. My master, I knew, would not live long.

**Author's Note:**

> I attempted to write the whole thing in UK English as a challenge. I give myself a 7/10. :Dc


End file.
